Word: carmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Less than 24 hours after Manotoc vanished, President Marcos phoned the young man's father to ask him to be "discreet" and contact neither the press nor the police. But Carmen Manotoc, the missing bridegroom's mother, spoke out, blaming the Marcoses directly for the kidnaping. Said she: "I couldn't think of anything else but them. I kept warning him, 'You're playing with fire, you're way over your head.' " President Marcos angrily denied the charges and denounced what he called "wild and false speculations insinuating the involvement of the President...
...review of Peter Brook's recent version of Georges Bizet's Carmen [Dec. 21] at the Bouffes de Nord in Paris collapses when it argues, "Would anyone think of touching up the Mona Lisa, redesigning St. Peter's, or editing Paradise Lost? These works already exist as painting, edifice and book; they are frozen in time. By its very nature, however, an opera (or play, for that matter) exists by reconstructing it anew from its blueprint. There is no aesthetic rule that says something cannot be left out or rearranged. The only valid criterion is: Does...
...jealous rage Don José kills two men-his lieutenant Zuniga and Carmen's husband García (a character in Mérim&233;e's story). By the time Carmen's turn comes, he has nothing left to lose, no emotion to spend, and he plunges a knife into the kneeling woman's back as if he were an executioner doing his job. For her part, Carmen is an even more explicitly sexual creature than she is usually portrayed. She sings the famous Habanera while engaging in some erotic byplay with a cigar, thrusting...
Brook defends his treatment of Carmen as something historically necessary: "Brick by brick, layer by layer, opera has been encased over the centuries to the point where today it is perhaps the most unnatural object in the whole of our society. To correct this, we must go back to the very roots of what the composer has in mind, to restore opera to its natural life...
...production's dramatic effectiveness, it is to be hoped that Brook's Carmen will not be widely imitated. Would anyone think of touching up the Mono Lisa, redesigning St. Peter's or editing Paradise Lost? Opera is in many eyes a more suspect art form, and thus it is fair game. But composers usually know their own works, and later interpreters should look closely at the foundation before they start removing the bricks. -By Michael Walsh. Reported by William Blaylock/Paris